Lecture Series: The lists and Tricks of laughing

LECTURE SERIES
The lists and Tricks of laughing.
On the interference between the comical and the performative.

Why you can\'t tickle yourself ...
Sibylle Peters (D) / Kai van Eikels (D)
Date: Fri, Nov 18, 18:00
Venue: TQW / Studios

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Stumble, abandon, imitate
Laughing and the groundlessness of the subject
Gerald Siegmund (D)
Date: Fri, Oct 18, 18:00
Venue: TQW / Studios

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What still makes us laugh in the theatre - and do we know why and whether? And to what extent does this uncertainty shape the conditions of possibility of the comical? And also of the performative? And what has the repeated questioning \"and\" between the listing and repetition and difference got to do with the conjunctive, splicing and simultaneously splitting contrariness only marking possibility, which laughing articulates - laughing as \"a chaos of articulation\" (Walter Benjamin)?

To what extent does laughing as embodied disarticulation, as a tension between language and body, influence dance and performance today? To what extent does it form its critical potential? The comical as well as the performative certainly mark the aporias of conventions, the missing of place and time, the chances of possible failure, the body\'s doubting of the language and vice versa, the lapse as an indicator of the repressed, the power of the diffuse, the racy standstill of the punch lines. And all the crisis symptomatics of the performative, in which body and language upend each other, talk at cross purposes, pass each other by, collide with one another.

As a reaction to a rhythm collision laughter marks the vibrating aesthetic interval between the parallel worlds to which we funny people simultaneously belong. As funny as the list or impossible taxonomy in Jorge Luis Borges\' text that lists the animals as follows: \"a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies\".

In the tricky rhythm of disagreement full of lists, laughing short-circuits paradoxically the parallel levels of articulation and problematises the unquestioned machinery of community and representation slowing it down by sticking it - as if in its throat. \"Split the audience. . . . Give them a taste of laughing alone,\" instructs Tim Etchells. Laughing as the lonely trick of abolished belongings and conjunctions, as the trick of lists, which splits and frustrates the control and relief functions of collective laughing. And nevertheless laughs.

Conzept: Krassimira Kruschkova, Head of Theory & Media Centre, Tanzquartier Wien.

www.tanzquartierwien.at